President Donald Trump has granted a full and unconditional pardon to former Navy sailor Patrick “Tate” Adamiak, ending a 20-year federal prison sentence stemming from a firearms prosecution that became a rallying point for gun-rights organizations.
Adamiak, who served as a Navy master-at-arms, received the pardon Sept. 4 after spending nearly four years behind bars.
Federal authorities arrested Adamiak in 2022 after Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents searched his Virginia Beach residence.
Prosecutors said Adamiak had obtained and sold unregistered machine guns between October 2021 and April 2022. The government said an ATF confidential source purchased eight machine guns from him before agents recovered additional firearms during the search.
Investigators also said they discovered two grenade launchers and two antitank missile launchers at the home.
A federal jury convicted Adamiak in October 2022 of receiving, possessing and transferring unregistered machine guns as well as possessing four unregistered destructive devices.
He was sentenced in June 2023 to 20 years in federal prison.
Adamiak and gun-rights organizations that later championed his case disputed important portions of the government’s characterization of the seized items.
The Second Amendment Foundation argued that some of the objects were inert military collectibles, replicas or nonfunctioning components rather than operational weapons.
The organization specifically said two RPG launchers had holes drilled into their receivers and were missing internal components.
SAF also accused ATF personnel of adding components to evidence during testing, allegations that became central to the campaign seeking presidential clemency. The organization described Adamiak’s conviction as unjust, while the original Justice Department prosecution maintained that the items met the legal definitions of regulated machine guns and destructive devices.
The advocacy organization announced Friday that Trump had pardoned Adamiak, saying the former sailor was immediately eligible for release.
The pardon document described the action as a “full and unconditional pardon” covering the offenses in United States v. Adamiak.
Adamiak reportedly had approximately 16 years remaining on his sentence when Trump intervened.
Second Amendment Foundation officials celebrated the decision, saying they had spent years investigating the prosecution and pushing for his release.
Lee Williams, an editor with SAF’s Investigative Journalism Project, said the group was grateful the administration had acted and that Adamiak was returning to his family.
The pardon was not Trump’s only firearms-related clemency action that day.
Gun Owners of America said Trump also pardoned George Peterson, Jeremy Kettler and Shane Cox, three men convicted in separate cases involving federal firearms regulations under the National Firearms Act.
Peterson, a Louisiana firearms dealer, pleaded guilty after federal agents found an unregistered suppressor during a 2022 search. He was sentenced in January 2024 to two years in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
Peterson later challenged the federal registration requirement on Second Amendment grounds, but the Fifth Circuit rejected his argument and the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal in April.
Kettler and Cox were convicted in Kansas after relying in part on the state’s 2013 Second Amendment Protection Act, which asserted that certain firearms and accessories manufactured and retained within Kansas were outside some federal regulations, per the Conservative Brief.
Federal courts ultimately rejected that defense, holding that federal firearms law superseded the state provision. Both men received probation following their convictions.
Trump’s four pardons do not overturn the National Firearms Act or invalidate the statutes involved in the prosecutions. They instead eliminate the federal consequences of the individual convictions covered by the clemency grants.
For Adamiak, the decision immediately ended a prison sentence that had become the focus of a years-long campaign by Second Amendment advocacy groups.
